


This Side / That Side

by Azure_Lynx



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, Exploring the mechanics of the Upside Down, Gen, Healing, It's not a friendship fic per se, Post S3, Season 3 insert, Sort of Barb anyway, gay angst, gay happiness, it's a twisted sort of friendship, it's the upside down
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-15
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2021-02-24 16:21:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21800869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azure_Lynx/pseuds/Azure_Lynx
Summary: Will was supposed to be asleep, and she was supposed to be dead. But his friends were supposed to look out for him, too, and things hadn't quite been going as they should, these days.
Relationships: Robin Buckley & Will Byers, Will Byers & Barbara "Barb" Holland
Comments: 16
Kudos: 40





	1. That Side

“Sucks, doesn’t it?”

Will is asleep. He knows he’s asleep, because he remembers being in the Wheelers’ basement with Lucas and Mike, only now he’s at Steve Harrington’s house - a place he’s only been a couple times in real life, but he’d recognize the architecture easily. Not to mention the pool, because not many people in Hawkins could afford their own pool. Especially Will’s family. It’s always seemed the height of luxury to him. 

But the pool is empty, now, and the world is dark, and Will is sitting with his feet dangling over the edge of the pool, brushing against the weird vines growing, and he _knows_.

“You’re dead,” he says in response, taking one deep breath, then another. He doesn’t ask what sucks. Frankly, he doesn’t want to know. He’d like to get out of here, but willing himself to wake up is not working. “You’re _dead_ ,” he repeats with more conviction. 

She shrugs. “Sort of.” The thing that looks rather like Barb Holland swings her legs off the edge of the diving board. “You _know_ things are more complicated than that here.”

He doesn’t like the way she acts like he’s in on some secret. “We had a funeral for you.” He screws his eyes shut, then opens them again. Still there. 

“You had a funeral for _her_ ,” Not-Barb replies. “No one would miss me if I was gone. Least of all Nancy.” She points up to a window where Will knows Steve’s bedroom is. “She’s up there, having sex with Steve Harrington as we speak.”

Will glances away, awkwardly trying not to think about that, especially because Nancy is dating Jonathan now and she’s Mike’s older sister and this is all _super weird_.

“I was _so angry_ ,” Not-Barb continues. Then she laughs. “Or, I guess, the other one was. I’m always angry.” She peers at Will with a stare that cuts him right down to the core. “I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.”

“I don’t,” he replies, and it’s half a lie, but Not-Barb isn’t his friend so it doesn’t really matter. 

She laughs again, something about it sounding like snapping wood. “Oh, to be a fifteen year old girl realizing you liked girls. Realizing you were in love with your best friend.” She sighs. “Oh, I thought she was perfect. She hated boys and dating and all that stuff just as much as I did.” Her voice turns venomous. “Until Steve-fucking-Harrington comes along.”

And Will _does_ know, and god, he hates that he knows. Hates it. He wants to have nothing in common with this...thing, that isn’t Barb.

Will knew Barb was a lesbian. Or at least, he’d guessed. But then she was gone and he’s still here and so is _that_ and it doesn’t matter what he knows or knew or didn’t. 

“Oh, she was mad. She was hurt. Her heart was breaking, and Nancy didn’t even notice. Nancy just went upstairs to screw like a bunny. And left me all alone.”

There’s a gash on Not-Barb’s hand, deep and putrid and oozing something black. If Will looks too hard in her eyes, he can see that same darkness reflected back at him, something not quite human behind the wire glasses and the face of a dead teenage girl. The flipping between “her” and “me” gets him, really, but he thinks maybe that’s what she’s trying to do, so her focuses on her body rather than her words, searching for some seam with which he can tear the whole illusion open. 

“You like it?” she asks, holding up her injured hand so he can get a better look. “I stabbed myself trying to impress Nancy. Didn’t give a single shit about the others, really” - Will startles, because he knows enough to know that Barb would never talk like this - “but dear, sweet, Nancy. I couldn’t stand to lose her attention to some _boy_.” She spits out the word the same way Will has been thinking the word “girls” in moments dark enough he’d never admit them out loud. And she knows, because she cackles at his flinch, watching him closely, never blinking.

He swallows. “I’m sorry,” he tells her, and it’s honest. He’s sorry for everything that happened to Barb. He’s sorry for the heartbreak he knows too well. 

“Oh, she was a bitch to Nancy.” Not-Barb laughs, again with the woody scraping sound that makes every hair on Will’s neck stand up. She swings her legs farther, faster. “She deserved every damn thing she got, and then some.” 

Then, she does something strange. She stops - goes completely still, no movements, no breath, no pulse - and then mechanically stands up on the diving board. “Watch this,” she demands with a feral smile, before springing up and diving off the board. 

He throws his hands over his eyes in horror - Will doesn’t want to see her die, not again, not whatever the hell is coming next - but when all he hears is laughter, he glances down to see a black and red glob with a pair of glasses on top. 

She re-forms, shaping from goop to human. “You’re a coward, you know.”

He doesn’t like to think about it, but he knows. He shrugs in response. 

“It’s okay. I was a coward, too.” Not-Barb climbs her way out of the pool, back over to the diving board, and then she sits. Or perches, more accurately, legs twisted in a way that doesn’t seem remotely human. “You’re still alive, though. For now. You could always say something. Sure, they might call you names. But you’ve earned that. Go on. Challenge the psychic girl.”

Will shivers, even though it’s July, even though he’s wearing pajama pants and an extra large t-shirt that used to belong to Jonathan. “Why me?” he asks, in a small voice. It’s a coalescence of a million questions, leaving his body all at once. It has nothing to do with the fact that Barb liked girls and he likes boys and everything to do with the fact that he’s here, in this hellscape, instead of being asleep in Mike’s basement or home with his mom. 

Not-Barb shrugs. “Because there’s only one of you. Only one of her, too. That’s why _it’s_ so fascinated.” She bares her teeth, making a face at the ‘it’ in question, which Will has to assume is the Mind Flayer. “It wants to keep you on this side. It never got to play with you before.”

Will shivers. Somehow he feels he knows both less and more than he did before. 

With a blink, Not-Barb is next to him, grabbing his hand. “It’s okay,” she says. “I understand you. No one in this town will understand you like I do.” She grins a bit too wide. “She would’ve, too. But now there’s only me. So you may as well stay, you know?” She rolls her shoulders back once, twice, then narrows her eyes and goes in for the kill. “I mean, they’ve all got girlfriends now, right? Even your brother. Even Dustin, who you thought was like us, maybe. Would any of them even notice you’re gone?”

“Of course,” Will replies with more conviction than he feels, shaking off the different he feels, how Mike and Eleven and Lucas and Max and now Dustin and Suzie - “Of course they’d notice.”

Not-Barb shrugs. “Nancy didn’t.” And then she takes an arm and slides it around his shoulders, and _god_ she is so cold, everything in this place is so cold. “It’s okay. I’ve got you.”

And then she shoves him, hard, and he’s falling face first towards the bottom of Steve Harrington’s empty swimming pool. He doesn’t even scream, just clenches his eyes shut.

When he wakes, it’s pretty early, but there’s no going back to sleep after a dream like that. Besides, he wants to play D&D.


	2. This Side

He doesn’t know how he winds up at Robin’s house, only that he does. It’s been two weeks since they closed the gate, two weeks of El being catatonic with mourning in their house while his mother calls some woman named Terry Ives or something and starts putting all their things in boxes. 

He just needs to leave. 

So he gets on his bike and he goes, not caring where he ends up. He knows where Robin lives because his mom drove her home after Star Court, but he doesn’t realize he’s going there until he ends up right in front of her place. 

He glances around quickly. The last time something like this happened...but the sun is shining and he feels _warm_ , the kind of warm that doesn’t exist on That Side, so he’s just really distracted, he guesses. 

She’s sitting under a tree in the front lawn with a pair of giant sunglasses on, legs crossed with a book in her lap. She gives him a wave. “Hey, Will.” 

She calls him ‘Little Byers’ sometimes, the way Steve does, but rarely. He thinks, somehow, that it’s nice to have her all to himself - Steve, and everyone, they all know Jonathan, love Jonathan. Robin knows him too, but Will’s _her_ Byers.

She taps the grass beside her and he leans his bike on the kickstand before joining her. It’s cooler in the shade, and he spies the cover of the book she’s reading - _Zami_ , it’s called, by a woman named Audre Lorde. “A biomythography,” it says, and Will wonders what that means. 

“Zami?” she replies. “It’s a word from a Caribbean language meaning women who are friends and lovers.”

_Oh._ He’s so pleased by that he doesn’t even think to correct her that he was actually asking what a “biomythography” was.

She knows about him, because of course she does, so she gives him this soft smile that none of the others get and she puts her arm around his shoulders and she is warm. Will thinks that if he ever fell in love with a girl, it would be Robin, but he likes this so much better anyway. 

“Where did you get that?” he asks, because it’s not the kind of thing that would be stocked in any bookstore for miles and miles. 

“Pen pal in Portland.” She smiles fondly and it is beautiful, like a secret. “Sends me good books.”

He knew there were others like them, in the abstract, but to hear it confirmed so clearly sparks warmth somewhere deep inside Will’s heart. It got so lonely, sometimes, living in a world so different from those around him, but Robin makes him feel less lonely, and this anonymous person in Portland, and this author…

His mind flashes to Not-Barb, unbidden, and he shivers. He never did figure out if it was just a dream or if he had gone to the Upside Down, but he doesn’t want to think too hard about it.

“You cold?” Robin asks, teasing, bringing Will back to the present. To the sun on his skin. To the tree full of life and color. To the girl beside him who likes girls and isn’t dead and laughs like a trumpet and wrinkles her nose when she does it. 

He shakes his head. 

Steve Harrington was in love with Robin, but Robin is in love with Princess Leia, and the girl in Footloose, and pretty much every female lead in every movie she’s ever seen. They have queer movie nights, the two of them, where he listens to her fawn over girls and she paints his nails and they eat pizza and life is good. She’s been talking about maybe getting a job at the Family Video, now that she’s not making money from Scoops Ahoy, and honestly, Will supports it. He thinks she’d love it there.

She’s taking Steve with her. Steve Harrington, who confessed his love to her while high in a bathroom. Steve Harrington, who used to date Nancy and called Jonathan terrible names. He’s better now, and Will loves him. 

Robin had told Will the story haltingly, halfway between awkward and amused. “He just...told me he liked this girl...and then I was like ‘Oh shit.’” But there is nothing awkward or angry or bitter about it between them, just a lesbian who still gets the love she deserves. Will is happy for her.

He remembers his own “oh shit” moment from the Snow Ball last year. Dustin had Nancy to dance with him, but Will can’t help but wish Robin had been there for him. Still, better to have her around now and to have her for as long as he can.

“We’re moving,” he tells her, even though she already knows. She nods, though, like it doesn’t bother her to hear it again, to traipse the same conversational hills they’ve already crossed. 

“Did your mom pick a city yet?” she asks. Last time, the contenders had been Chicago and Milwaukee. 

“Chicago.” He pulls his knees up to his chest. “I don’t want to go.”

“Well, y’know.” Robin slides her bookmark in and puts the book to the side, focusing all her attention on Will. She’s the kind of girl that makes you feel special, mature and respected and listened to, even though she’s a senior and he’s a freshman and social norms say there should be none of this. “Chicago has a pretty cool Pride march in June. I could come visit next summer, and we go together.”

“Really?” Will asks, because he’s never really thought there could be… _enough_ of them to have a march in any one place. 

Robin nods enthusiastically. “Yeah! They’ve even got a neighborhood that’s full of gay people.” She says the last part quiet, because it is still Hawkins, but bright with electric excitement. “I’m actually thinking about moving there for school next year.” 

He likes that idea. He knows Jonathan’s always had his heart set on NYU but is looking at schools in Chicago, knows that Nancy wants to go wherever Jonathan will be, knows that Steve will follow Robin to the ends of the earth. It wouldn’t be Hawkins, and there wouldn’t be Mike/Dustin/Lucas/Max, but he’d have some of his friends in the new home and it’d be nice.

“Cool.” He looks at her and he smiles. “It’d be nice to have her.”

“I’ll sneak you into the gay bars,” she promises, and Will thinks that if there’s a heaven, that’s what it is - not the alcohol, which he doesn’t care much for one way or another, as determined by raiding Mr. Wheeler’s stash of expensive bourbon, but rather a place where you can gather and just...be yourself.

He thinks of Mike and Jane, of Lucas and Max - even Suzie, who’s no more than a voice to him, with Dustin, and he thinks, someday that’ll be him, with someone more perfect than anyone he could ever find in Hawkins. 

“There’s a great big world out there, Will,” Robin always tells him. A great big world full of all sorts of people, boys who kiss boys and boys who used to be girls and people who are neither and people who kiss anyone. 

Now, she pulls him in closer. “You’re one of the bravest people I know,” she says, and the nice thing is, he believes she means it. He doesn’t know if it’s true, because he doesn’t feel all that special himself, but he has survived so many things and he knows he will keep on surviving. 

She promises him, not for the first time, “We’re gonna be okay.”

Especially with Robin by his side.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we are. First pain, then healing. We explore the parts of Will he doesn't like, reflected back at him in the Upside Down and Not-Barb, but there is the promise he will be okay. We will all be okay.  
> I am so glad this fic appeared to me. I hope you all enjoyed it as much as I did.

**Author's Note:**

> So I don't...quite know what this is? I just thought about how what happened with Barb and Nancy season 1 was playing out again with Will and his friends in season 3, kind of, and this just appeared. Then I thought about the scene where Billy stares himself in the face in the Upside Down and was like...hm. So then this happened. Glad to be over my writer's block, still kind of confused. Hope y'all enjoyed though!


End file.
